At CLOC's annual conference in Las Vegas this week, Mike Haven of The Gap and Steve Harmon of Cisco Systems gave some pointers on how to build an ops function where there wasn't one before. "It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon," Haven said.

At the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium's annual institute in Las Vegas, top female in-house lawyers explained what they want from outside firms. To impress these powerful attorneys, it's clear law firms will need to practice what they preach on diversity.

"By putting ourselves out there in this way, it will result in civil society and other organizations looking for other ways to hold the industry to account, in an age where talk is cheap," Cisco GC Mark Chandler told Corporate Counsel on Tuesday.

The Corporate Legal Operations Consortium is in the midst of designing a framework that will help corporate legal departments better evaluate how well firms can protect valuable client data, and give firms real standards to shoot for on cybersecurity.

"The dashboards provide a very effective way to determine or create what people call actionable insights. You want to use the data to inform and drive decision-making," said Scott Fuller, director of legal operations at Applied Materials.

"It feels like the law firms are going to do what we ask them to do, but oftentimes, we’re not telling them what we want," said one in-house ops leader at the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium's annual institute.

Corporate Legal Operations Consortium’s annual gig kicks off in Vegas next week, with more than double last year’s big crowd. This global in-house column explores why the legal ops role makes sense for companies headquartered worldwide, with bonus tips from the pros on how you can make it happen.